[curstpriest]

It usually works fine for viewing full page documents. I have read many textbooks in PDF format. 8.5 boos can sometimes have text that gets a little small, I advise you crop margins to remove header/footers of those books to make text larger (kindle scales the document and removes white margins, doing this gives you more reading space). Reading smaller books - such as the "for dummies" books that are 7 by 4 or whatever work great.

Few issues:
If the document is really tall (not standard 8.5x11) it may not show the bottom of the page or crop it. Some minor fiddling in acrobat (or other pdf editing software) can fix this using crops, or you can go to view document actual size and pan, but that is usually a hassle.
If you view the document in landscape mode, characters will be cut off half way though a sentence/line.



When I deal with scanned books (if they are 300+ dpi scanned images) your best option if you have acrobat pro is to do as follows (If you don't have high-res scans, don't use clearscan, it will fail or look bad):

OCR text recognition -> Recognize text with OCR
Go with ClearScan, 300 dpi (will make moderate sized file) 300 page book -> 20mb with moderate images.
Basically clear scan works by replacing text in the image with a custom font, that looks great. It leaves a low rez image behind (300 dpi that you chose in this case) when there are problems with the ocr and it can't match 1:1 to the clearscan font.

So if you have an image with text+images, you will get a new page with text + broken up images. The text is searchable. Images that are converted to text successfully are deleted reducing the file size.